Captain James Cook encounters another Polynesian population, the Maori of New Zealand, when he circumnavigates the two major islands in 1769-70. (Abel Tasman, the first European contact, had arrived off the coast of New Zealand in December 1642, had battled with a group of Maori on the South Island, and had left the area largely unexplored.)
Cook, in reporting on the suitability of New Zealand for colonization, also writes about the intelligence of the Maori.
Their traditional history describes their origins in terms of waves of migration beginning about CE 1150 and culminating in the arrival of a “great fleet” in the fourteenth century from Hawaiki, a mythical land usually identified as Tahiti.
There are supposedly ancient Maori traditions of a race who were in New Zealand when the Maoris arrived.
They were fair-skinned with blonde or red hair, and constructed stone circles and other monuments.
The Maoris would have killed and eaten them, of course, as was generally their custom until well into the nineteenth century.
Still, there were early reports of red-haired Maoris, so perhaps they didn't eat all the aboriginal inhabitants, or maybe there were natural redheads among the Maori.
The most current reliable evidence strongly indicates that initial settlement of New Zealand, by Polynesians from Eastern Polynesia, occurred around 1280 CE, the date of the earliest archaeological sites and the beginning of sustained, anthropogenic deforestation.
